>>entails a certain narrative about historical progress: we can move to a new and better age once we have dispensed with superstition. Atheism is more than the rejection of religion as false: it is the belief that religion is an evil that holds back human history. (Empahsis added)

Huh? Really? Atheism entails (‘to have, impose, or require as a necessary accompaniment or consequence’) a certain narrative about historical progress? All atheists have the same view of history without which atheism would be impossible? Gosh. I’m an atheist. I’m also a historian who – like most of my colleagues – holds to a quite different narrative of history than the ‘it’s getting better all the time’ version which Hobson imagines. Does this make me a logical impossibility? Or, perhaps not a ‘true’ atheist (on the ‘no true Scot’ model). Or perhaps I’m not a ‘true’ historian. Which would be worrying…if this whole argument weren’t so obviously ridiculous.

Indeed. Ridiculous and yet all too familiar – the ever-popular ‘define atheism as any old thing you feel like and then triumphantly explain why that atheism is all wrong and silly and besides it’s a “faith” itself so ha’ trick. It’s one of those things that is so drearily familiar, so endlessly recycled however often it is shown to be wrong and self-serving and tendentious, that it should have its own ‘foul’ flag that we could just wave whenever it turns up. ‘Foul!’ Ten years of silence while you contemplate your sins.

J Carter Wood then goes on to Hobson’s (also familiar) claim that ‘atheism itself is the product, not as you might expect of the Enlightenment or the development of science, but rather of….protestantism.’

Now, it’s true that no idea comes from nowhere and, thus, ‘derives from’ something else; however, there seem to be several major intellectual steps missing between Christianity and ‘the atheist narrative’ (what, only one?) which Hobson decries. The Reformation was certainly an important precursor to the Enlightenment (and even after that a lot of ostensibly secularist thinking has remain influenced by religious assumptions or frameworks), but Hobson’s relentless effort to detach atheism from science and link it with a blind, naive optimism about the human condition is bizarre…Hobson’s argument here relies rather heavily, and awkwardly, on the history of Positivism – which did certainly have a startlingly teleological and progressive view of history – which Gray presented in Al Qaeda and What It Means to be Modern. By casting all secularists into that bizarre mould (which is a mistake which Gray himself – for all his worth as a thinker – all too often makes…while all positivists might have been atheists, the equation doesn’t work equally well in the opposite direction), Hobson is confusing two very different things: the scientific, secular worldview and a very specific (though in its time influential) intellectual movement which did, at times, develop certain cult-like trappings…If anything, it is a skeptical, secular and scientific outlook which tends against most kinds of fundamentalist optimism.

Self-publicising fine. Great post – I especially like the part about Hobson’s quoting the atheist philosopher Julian Baggini – who happens to be my boss. He ‘agrees that dogmatic atheism is unattractive,’ indeed! I’ll give him unattractive! Well actually that’s Hobson’s paraphrase, apparently, and we’ve seen how skilled Hobson is at accurate paraphrase, so I won’t say cutting evil things to Julian just yet.

Why would you snicker Ophelia? Hobson hasn’t imagined it, it’s there in Julian’s book – Atheism, p.106: “I am not … convinced that a strong case can be made that religion is essentially and especially harmful. Nor do I believe that a firm belief in the falsity of religion is enough to justify militant opposition to it. At root, … I think my opposition to militant atheism is based on commitment to the very values that I think inspire atheism: an open-minded commitment to the truth and rational enquiry. … Hostile opposition to the beliefs of others combined with dogged conviction of the certainty of one’s own beliefs is, I think, antithetical to such values.” Perhaps you could hold off on the snark and explain exactly what you find objectionable about that?

Thanks, Jonathan; kind of you to give me the benefit of the doubt. I didn’t say Hobson had imagined it; I said we’ve seen how skilled Hobson is at accurate paraphrase, by which I meant he isn’t, which is true. I noticed that ‘dogmatic atheism is unattractive’ was not in quotation marks so I thought it probably Hobson’s paraphrase rather than Julian’s words; I don’t see that particular phrase in the passage you quoted; so I continue to think it was a rather sloppy paraphrase by Hobson.

But more to the point, I was joking, for Christ’s sake. I’d have thought that was obvious. ‘Unattractive’ – it’s quite a funny word to use; I was pretending to think Julian had called me ugly; get it? It was a JOKE.

Side-splitting I’m sure. I don’t especially want to defend Hobson, but it’s worth pointing out that the passage Tom Freeman quotes Hobson paraphrasing isn’t from the book but from an interview. And in any case, I can’t see that “dogmatic atheism is unattractive” isn’t a perfectly acceptable paraphrase of the passage from the book. It’s not a “sloppy” paraphrase, it’s just a paraphrase.

I didn’t say it was funny, I said it was a joke: i.e. not “snark,” not a literal snicker at what Julian said; merely a joke. First you go at me for snickering and “snark,” then instead of apologizing for being so fucking rude, you complain that the joke wasn’t funny. Well if you don’t like the jokes, go to another club!

“but it’s worth pointing out that the passage Tom Freeman quotes Hobson paraphrasing isn’t from the book but from an interview.”

I know that. You’re the one who quoted the book at me, for no known reason. I never mentioned the book. I looked for the interview yesterday before posting the comment, but it appears not to be online; there’s only the passage Hobson quoted, so I can’t tell how accurate he was.

“And in any case, I can’t see that “dogmatic atheism is unattractive” isn’t a perfectly acceptable paraphrase of the passage from the book. It’s not a “sloppy” paraphrase, it’s just a paraphrase.”

I don’t know if it is or not, I’m not talking about the book, I haven’t read the book, I never mentioned the book, so why are you telling me that?

I have a feeling (hard to be more precise than that about Hobson’s verbal vapors) that he is trying to allude to one of the hoary cliches of religious (especially reactionary Christian) folk: that Christianity, with its idea of original sin, has a tragic view of human nature far superior to that of secular humanism. Namely, that there is a radical fault in fallen human nature which makes historical progress actually impossible. Ever since the Cain and Abel business, we have been at each other’s throats, etc.

But the “good news,” that Christ came to save us from original sin, ought to imply, it seems to me, that Christian believers should be obviously superior to the rest of us. But no, a lot of them, at least, are obviously just about as blood-thirsty as we unbelievers, if not more so. So perhaps faith in Christ actually doesn’t cure original sin? Or perhaps only does so in a sufficient dose, like antibiotics — you have to finish the whole course? I’ve always gotten rather confused at about that point in the theology lecture.

Yeah, I’m well familiar with the “tragic view of human nature” stuff – I actually read a fair bit of religious history at university, believe it or not. If that’s what Hobson meant, my, he’s even worse at saying what he means than I thought.

The thing about the tragic view though is that Christians don’t have to be better than the rest of us: God’s grace is gratuitous, we can’t “earn” it, we can never deserve it; God just gives it, or not, for God’s own reasons, which our tragic little minds can’t know. Goodness is nothing, justification by faith is the thing.

It’s funny about this. I can think of three people (two of them are philosophers, which is amusing) who once in a blue moon drop in to give me a dam’ good (verbal) thrashing. All three are remarkably hostile and unpleasant, and sometimes just plain inaccurate. Then they go away again. They’re like three people with Tourette’s syndrome. Clearly I’ve deeply annoyed all three of them, and once in awhile they just burst. So it goes.

N.E. Way, is it not the conflation of “Militant” [Baggini] with “Dogmatic” [Hobson], which is at issue? One can be very dogmatic without being militant [and indeed vice versa — just think of all those teenagers rebelling against they know not what…] I know I’d rather have dogmatic opponents than militant ones…

Well the conflation of militant and dogmatic wasn’t the issue in my case, at least, because the passage from the interview that Hobson quoted doesn’t use either word. The word ‘militant’ is in the passage that Jonathan quoted, from the book, but I don’t have the book and haven’t read it so wasn’t citing it in the original comment on Hobson-Baggini.

The word ‘dogmatic’ was something of an issue in my mind, but it appeared in Hobson’s paraphrase (outside quotation marks) so I couldn’t tell whether it reflected Julian’s meaning accurately or not, much less whether or not Julian had used that particular word – so I decided not to go after that particular word, though I was tempted.

Mind you, I think I partly disagree with what Julian says in the bit that Jonathan quoted, but that’s another matter, and I can’t very well argue with it when I haven’t read the book.

The thing about the tragic view though is that Christians don’t have to be better than the rest of us: God’s grace is gratuitous, we can’t “earn” it, we can never deserve it; God just gives it, or not, for God’s own reasons, which our tragic little minds can’t know. Goodness is nothing, justification by faith is the thing.

Only in the Calvinist view (which I have always found intractably depressing). In Catholicism, you’d have to do good stuff or at least not too much bad stuff like genocides and so on to pass on to Purgatory – which I understand is the best thing the likes of us who are not particularly enthusiastic about Christian martyrdom can aim for. I always found it quite sympathetic that Catholicism distinguishes a third category of ordinary slobs in addition to the blessed and the damned. In as far as God exists, I am sure he would look down kindly on our tragically flawed nature (which, biblically, he shares some responsibility for!).

There’s issues with the Catholic view as well, of course (God encouraging good deeds for people to buy their way into eternity, rather than out of their own intrinsic goodness). But I find the Protestant/Evangelical “entry by faith only” even less sympathetic. The whole idea of a personal, eternal afterlife seems quite horrible to me when I come to think of it – even though the notion of a God handing out the justice that so many don’t receive in their lives is to an extent very attractive. But I’m a lot more attracted to versions of religion which expressly deny survival of consciousness.

Yeah – by ‘the tragic view’ I meant to indicate Calvinism and Lutheranism. In a way I sort of liked the Lutheran view of the gratuitousness of grace – though that was partly just in comparison with the Catholic view of indulgences, which seemed too absurd to bear.

What the gratuitousness of grace view would have going for it, in my opinion, would be that it installs a kind of humility in face of God, the universe, the massiveness of it all, and our own infinitesmall place in all of it. However, if God would really be wholly other, with ways that are wholly mysterious – one could wonder whether there is any point in anything else but blind, reasonless faith, something which if I understand is indeed a major point of Protestant theology.

I prefer Hartshorne’s view, which charges conceptions of the afterlife as imposing some kind of temporal structure to the whole immortality thing. If God is immanent in the universe and in us, our “immortality” in God would be right here, right now: when we die, God may remember our feelings and deeds with perfect clarity, our loved ones with much less clarity, but our own first-person perspective on things is lost forever. Other people will live after us, and why must we necessarily experience eternity for ourselves? In my opinion, it is the briefness and frailty of life which makes it so precious. It also makes ethical demands of us which I have difficulty reconciling with any idea of personal immortality. The Jewish idea that ending a human life equals destroying an entire (subjectively experienced) universe would not fit with it at all.

Needless to say, this is probably the main stumbling-block between me and mainstream Christianity. It’s not that the idea of the resurrection of Christ is nonsensical to me as such: it’s that the event would, to me, negate the whole meaning of what went on before (Jesus dying, in a very final sense, on the cross in order to share the fate of humanity).

“would be that it installs a kind of humility in face of God, the universe, the massiveness of it all, and our own infinitesmall place in all of it.”

Yes, I think that was my view of it at the time – that if you’re going to do it at all (which I wasn’t), you might as well do it for real, that way, rather than pretending it’s like going to the post office.

‘It’s not that the idea of the resurrection of Christ is nonsensical to me as such: it’s that the event would, to me, negate the whole meaning of what went on before (Jesus dying, in a very final sense, on the cross in order to share the fate of humanity).’